Passion or skill?

Tonight, we attended Sarah's end-of-camp celebration, at which many of the young writers, including Sarah, read poems and story sections they had written during the camp. As I have each year, I found the writing of extremely variable quality but the passion uniformly high and admirable.

It's easy to poke fun at teen writing, and there's certainly plenty of bad examples. I know I contributed more than my fair share to the world when, as a young poet, I churned out a few hundred poems, most of which were heartfelt and poorly executed. Many folks also like to decry teen writing, especially teen poetry, for its raw, direct, and frequently unskilled nature.

And yet.

And yet there's a passion in a great deal of teen writing that I find powerful and alluring and praiseworthy.

All of which made me confront one of those hypothetical questions that is useless in any real sense but nonetheless interesting, at least to me, as a sort of directional guide:

If you absolutely had to choose one, would you pick passion or skill?

I'm talking about writing here, but the question extends naturally to other areas.

I know that skill will produce the better product. I also know that reading extremely passionate but unskilled work can be downright painful.

All that said, if I had to pick one, I'd go for passion.

Passion every time.

Burning with the fire

Early this afternoon, we dropped Sarah at the writers' camp where she'll live for most of the next two weeks. This year marks her fourth consecutive attendance. She loves the camp and looks forward to it all year. While she's there, she's among a different family: young women and men who all, like her, love writing, exist more than a bit outside the core of their schools, feel they don't fit in, find joy and sadness and the full range of emotions in art, and who most of all burn with the fire of ideas and passions and emotions almost impossible to express.

Sarah tries to explain it to us, but I'm sure she's convinced we don't understand.

At one level, we don't, because we're not there. Each human's experience is unique, each moment a fresh bit of magic that will never occur again, and we can no more know the heart of another than we can swim in the center of the sun.

At a different level, though, we do, at least some of us do, because we've been there. We were young, and our passions burned us, too. Everything was both possible and impossibly magical and far away and frustrating and out of our control and bound to be better and different when we were in control.

Do you know the game in which someone makes you close your eyes and answer truthfully, with the first number to pop into your mind, the simple question: on the inside, how old are you? I'm sixteen. Always will be.

At sixteen I thought I would change the world for the better. Songs, books, movies, poems, stories, pictures--art of all sorts--threatened to rip my heart from my chest. Each flame of passion flickered so hotly and so brightly that I could scarcely approach it--and yet I had no choice but to stand in them all, each and every one. I was so intense few could stand to be near me.

I'm now the older, slightly wiser, mellow me, and if you know me you probably find the mere confluence of the words "mellow" and "Mark" to be hilarious. I work to be calmer, more controlled, more adult, a decent parent, partner, colleague, lover, friend--whatever role I'm playing at the moment. I teach safe sex to my children--and I mean it, don't have unprotected sex!--and I try to help them reach adulthood and have happy, successful lives.

At night, though, when I'm alone in my office, writing, or sometimes when I'm trying to sleep, I open my heart to sixteen again. I am sixteen again. I rage at the idiots hurting our world, I lash out at those who want to turn other people into beings less than human, I shadowbox with the demons of my lifetime of failures, I wrestle with all my might with my constant sense of inadequacy from giving those I love and who depend on me so much less than they need. The demons and I go to war. I play music, and my heart breaks with love or sadness or hope or joy. I read passages that move me. I stare at art that shakes my core.

I burn, burn, burn.

So, my advice to Sarah and her friends is simple: soak up this time and store it as you must to get you through the coming days of normal life. None of us can sustain the heat day in and day out for all the moments of our lives, but when you get the chance to join hands with those who feel as you do, do it, dive in with all you have, and wring all the joy and art you can from these precious weeks. Stand in the magical fire of art and passion and the collective might of those like you, and burn with it.